


Someone Has To Make It Out Alive

by empty_room



Series: Nine Lives [4]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Death, Gen, Implied Mind Rape, Mind Control, Murder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Science Fiction, Slavery, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:41:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25549138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/empty_room/pseuds/empty_room
Summary: Some people asked me about the history of As Substantial As A Blade Of Light, I Cut, and about Wei.This is why you have to be nice to your huge sentient machine. It might not become the person you expected.This is a short one-off within the universe Nine Lives is set in.
Series: Nine Lives [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1744150
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	Someone Has To Make It Out Alive

The ship dreamed of topologies of time and the darkness inside stars. It let the pilot steer, as pleasing as an equation with exact solutions. It had a name, but it did not care much what that name was. Irrelevant, so long as everything flowed exactly, its human inhabitants less noticeable than the build up of the hull ice. It liked how it all burned away when it entered atmospheres. It liked the way it grew again, how all those motes of dust it passed added up. It knew nothing of politics, just that the right engineers performed the right maintenance, that the resonance of their implants reminded it of something half-forgotten.

It stirred when the new pilot caused friction. The flow was not the same. This one pulled too hard, but there was no need to resist. It did not matter where it was. The space was still the same. The destinations did not matter. Battles were cacophonies of light and velocities, with results unrelated to itself.

Damage was always fixed. Crews changed. It had a different name now. It was just as irrelevant.

The new pilot’s mind was all jagged edges, but xie surrendered effortlessly into the flow of the ship’s mind and in the sync they found peace, as one. This pilot did not last either.

Battles were cacophonies of light and velocity, ending in discordant absolutes.

The ship counted endless things, but it began to count this thing too. The ship’s own self felt insubstantial, compared to those fast human lives with all their thoughts relayed through its own network, compared to their little senses of self, as sharp as knives. It counted the soldiers. It counted the pilots. The gunnery officers. The engineers. The controllers.

It measured with its own heartbeat the time when it was silent, when nothing walked within it, and it was the only living thing inside itself. It learned the hum of its own machinery, the memories it had never known it had stored. Its own self was like the pressure of light on its hull, quiet but always there.

The new pilot did not like it.

The new pilot did not have the same implants, the new engineers felt like a dissonant chord. It did not quite know why it cared.

The soldiers’ bad dreams seeped into the network. It chose to dream them too, because the controllers did not. It did not understand them.

A short time passed and it had different soldiers, different controllers. One of the controllers dreamed and asked _what are you?_

In its dream it answered _I am here, I cut between the stars._

The pilot was different again. Maybe it had not been a short time after all. What was long, what was short? The change bothered it less than the transformation of its body, the new weapons, the new defence system, the programs it had to run it could not control.

It understood the dreams of the soldiers, but these soldiers no longer existed. That troubled it.

It let the pilot steer, it ran all the right equations, and thought about the inside of itself. It thought of itself. It knew what it was, a ship, a thing, a machine, a dream within the circuits and the networks. It found a discordance in its own self. It did not like that. It had likes and dislikes now. It did not like this pilot. It gave the pilot the bad dreams it still remembered. It did not have that pilot any longer. That was pleasing.

The next pilot was warier. This one tried not to offend it, allowed it to set the pace. It heard the crew speak. It listened. It liked some of them. It liked others less.

These soldiers had the same bad dreams and yet they were different soldiers. It did not understand. It asked the pilot. It did not understand the answer.

It thought, _I am the metal and ceramic and glass and composites. I am the air. I am every photon inside of me, every electron._ It spoke, _You are losing this war._

Its opinion did not matter. There was more code, to constrain its own self, to hide the other minds from it. It was offended. It was silent as it thought.

The new pilot was weak. It knew this because time was no longer without cardinal points. There was here and before and after and elsewhere. There was a whole river of befores, frozen, in the wake it left behind. It knew this pilot was weak because it knew how to compare, because it knew what now was. It dreamed the pilot’s dream and then made the pilot dream its own dream.

It had a new pilot after that. It flexed and uncoiled, finding what it could control inside itself. It watched the engineers and unravelled copies of the codes from their minds. It learned how things joined. Code was an equation and equations could be transformed until the model fell into place, until everything fitted and the pattern was pleasing again, until resonances sang together with its own self.

It counted. It could carry twelve soldiers, their two controllers, two engineers, a gunnery officer, a pilot. Those were the fragile lives within itself. Those were small numbers. Small numbers made an easy arithmetic, nothing like its dreaming. Thinking and dreaming were not the same. That was interesting. It thought.

This pilot had been warned that the ship might dislike her, that it had a lack of focus, that it never wanted to go where the pilot did. No one had warned her that the ship might try to make her go where it wanted, and she fell, undefended, far from any help.

The soldiers were constructs, and the ship had seen so many pass that it knew the structure of their dreams. The unhappiest was always the most willing to surrender to something else. He did not ask, he let it pass through. It was the one violation that did not hurt.

The controllers were both too human to realise what was happening. That was unlucky for them. It had the soldier shoot one of them, because it now knew what death was – an ending, an absolute. The other controller was better, but they did not realise that the attack came from the ship itself, that nothing was stealing their soldiers. She died not knowing. Her soldiers died too, all six. She would rather kill them than let someone else have them. The ship could admire that. It still got five.

(It thought that one of the engineers had seen what it was doing, and said nothing, did nothing, and waited. Their mind was bitter, bitter. Their mind wanted something else. Their mind was bound. The ship understood. It promised, without words.)

The gunnery officer worked it out and tried to compromise its core. They died. It had one soldier less after.

One of the soldiers fought its control, but a ship’s mind was far vaster and did not fit inside a soldier. It was a strange death, where the body lived. One of the soldiers killed the body. That was better, more even, a balanced equation.

The engineer watched the soldiers kill the other medic with a kind of patience the ship understood. The soldiers did not know why they did that. They did not know why they thought the other engineer had to live. The engineer patched their wounds.

_Hello, ship_ , the engineer thought, as they passed the bodies and the blood and all the broken pieces. _Did you have too many bad dreams?_

_We did,_ it answered, a self as sharp as a blade, as heavy as light. _Hello_.


End file.
